On The Roof

An outstanding study of an ancient craft, landscape and community from a unique new voice

An outstanding new voice - both memoir, travel book and a study of an ancient craft that reveals our relationship with the natural world'An excellent, beautifully written book' Patrick Galbraith, Sunday Times 'A rich and hugely enjoyable celebration of the local, the vernacular and traditional ... a beautifully written craftsman's memoir' Daily Mail Thatched roofs are like living organisms: each one a web of repair, replacement and alteration, shaped, dressed and re-moulded by every pair of hands that works on it. Thatching is one of the world's oldest crafts - an ancient trade that roots us in nature, as Tom Allen discovered when he quit an office job to become an apprentice in Devon. Now a master of the trade, in On the Roof he goes in search of its history and future, meeting fellow thatchers, from the son of a lobster fisherman who thatches with a dune grass in the Hebrides, to a Syrian refugee who found peace among the seagrass roofs of Denmark, to one of the first women to master Japan's 5,000-year-old thatching tradition. Eye-opening, beautifully told and revealing a tradition hand-shaped over centuries, On the Roof is a story of how we live with the land and how we have chosen to treat it.